Great stories / Great poems

Three hundred years ago, most people on the planet were not aware of any reality other than the one into which they were born. Now, thanks to electronic media and the speed by which people navigate physical and virtual reality, one is ever more aware of other "readings" of the human experience. Turn on your television set and BANG! – a cultural confrontation.

The kind of cultural confrontation that impacts on us the most is the one that strikes us at our core – the kind of confrontation Huck Finn continually experiences when he and Jim pull their raft over to the bank and head up towards the lights of civilised society – a society that has very little in common with the meandering dream of the river.

It is in the nature of this kind of confrontation – when it occurs in our own lives – that it frequently provides us with the impetus to tell stories. Indeed, it is this kind of confrontation – a core confrontation – that informs the action of drama and poetry.

The novelist, Chaim Potok, speaking to a fledging writer, once remarked: "If you know how your story ends before you write it, why write it?"

For Potok, one uncovered the story in a way not dissimilar to the way one journeyed through unexplored territory. The same goes for poetry. Discovery lies at the heart of both. It makes no sense whatsoever to go through the travail of all that writing if you already know where all possible destinations are located.

Stories and poems can be likened maps, but really, they are also - borrowing an idea from Ezra Pound - "periplum": wanderings in which one sights land "not as it looks on a map but as sea bord seen by men sailing."

A great story or a great poem is an outward manifestation of an inner journey, and their characters, personifications of aspects of the writer’s own being.

Poems, like stories, are possessed by character. A poem's "voice" is a character - the poem's persona. The most potent characters are those that are most lovingly and passionately explored, by virtue of the fact that we find or seek in them unresolved aspects of our lives, which we encounter over and over again. As storytellers and poets we imagine and plot the actions, playing out in dramatic situations, in snatches of speech and image, our incipient understanding of the beliefs and values which both wound and heal us.

A story is a world. A poem is a world.

As human beings, our encounters with other, seemingly different worlds, began at an early age. We were literally bombarded with alternate ways of thinking [about] the human experience. It is nothing to fear. It is also the source of everything that terrifies us.

In fact, it is good fortune when the ideas we have held as sacred, unassailable truths, are called into question. If we are to avoid stagnation and a life of opaque routine, we must remain ever open and enthusiastic about whatever it is that challenges our carefully constricted and ever-so-safe sense of what it means to belong to the world.

It is from this confrontation at the core of what makes us US that great storytelling and poetry springs – it produces the sort of literature that changes lives or at least disturbs one’s waking sleep.

Great stories and great poems take the chaos of human experience and map it, shape it, into feelings that transform our understanding of ourselves and others.

The telling and receiving of stories and poems is akin to the Aboriginal notion of "walkabout" – a journey of initiation, a quest of discovery – of self-discovery.

"To travel is to change.

"To travel is to grow.

"By way of the story we come to understand what travel really is.

"The inspired traveller realises – intuitively – that to partake in any genuine odyssey is not to travel through a hundred lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred pairs of eyes.

"Travel makes distance possible.

"Genuine travelling is not the overcoming of distance, but the discovery of distance, which is really the discovery of difference." (James Carse from Finite and Infinite Games).

In a world-well-told we are provoked to journey beyond the circle of our own immediacy, to hear, to see, to FEEL, other worlds – the inner and the outer - and how these strange and sometimes frightening regions connect with those aspects of the human experience which, in concert with other human beings, we hold in common.

Drama presents the invasion of one world by another, of one belief by another, of one value system by another. This invasion is what we so carelessly refer to as CONFLICT – CHANGE! But conflict – or disconnection – only has meaning within a context of belonging to something. Fragmentation lacks poignancy unless there is the possibility of unity and wholeness. Great stories and great poetry cannot merely be told from the perspective of a familiar and secure world – an identifiable world. They might start there, but the journey we must make as myth-makers of the tribe will – by dramatic and poetic necessity – take us far beyond our comfortable habits of thought.